Michael Pillsbury is one of the world’s foremost China strategists. Called a “hawk” by the New York Times and “the leading authority on China” by President Donald Trump, he is a senior fellow and the director for Chinese strategy at the D.C.-based Hudson Institute think tank.

Pillsbury was born in California in 1945, earned his undergraduate arts degree from Stanford University and his masters and doctorate degrees from Columbia University. After graduating, he was the assistant political affairs officer at the United Nations and, later, an analyst at RAND Corporation, a U.S. non-profit think tank created to bolster research analysis for the U.S. armed forces. It was there that he began advocating for the United States to create intelligence and military bonds with China, which became U.S. policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

A staff member for four U.S. Senate Committees from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Pillsbury also served as special assistant for Asian affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, under President George H. W. Bush. In December 2020 he was appointed Chairman of the U.S. Department of Defence policy advisory board.

Pillsbury is the author most recently of The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, published in 2015.

“If China undermines the world order in arms control, labor standards, human rights, international law and environmental pollution, it will be impossible to restore the last 75 years of global progress.”